Since Miss Mollie is not with us this morning (the Hemingways lost power last night and there’s a roughly one in three chance that she’s swimming the Potomac with a knife in her teeth as I write this), here’s the substitute teacher version of the smattering of new polls she’d normally be providing for you:

Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I know about the only place more liberal than my native Washington is Oregon. The fact that Obama is only up by +6 is the most telling poll I’ve seen in the last month.

Brian Rants: Having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I know about the only place more liberal than my native Washington is Oregon. The fact that Obama is only up by +6 is the most telling poll I’ve seen in the last month. · 16 minutes ago

They report oversampling the battleground states for this poll and cite that President Obama holds a 4-point lead when just those battleground states are considered (expect to hear plenty of this from the legacy media in the next day or so). Of course, to get that they sample D+8 (48-40).

Those samples include leaners.

What does it portend if Rasmussen and Gallup both have at least R+2, or dead-even with leaners, and NPR has to oversample D+8 to get the President a 4 point lead in battleground states?

A timely article by Samuelson on polling, nothing new per se but worth perusing:

Among pollsters, there’s fear that changing technology (mainly cellphones) and growing public unwillingness to do interviews are undermining telephone surveys — and that there’s no accurate replacement in sight. A recent study by the Pew Research Center reported its response rate at 9 percent, down from 36 percent in 1997. Put differently: in 1997, Pew made about three residential calls to get one response; now it makes 10…

Cellphones pose problems because people who use them exclusively — people who don’t have landline phones — are younger, poorer and more Democratic than the general population. By late 2011, 32 percent of Americans 18 and over had only a cellphone, up from 16 percent in early 2008. Among those 25 to 29, the share was 60 percent…

All this threatens the largest upheaval in polling since the 1930s.

It would be wise for us to be neither too jovial nor excessively distraught, no matter the direction these numbers indicate.

Feel free to dismiss this as whistling past the graveyard, but as I’ve been telling my wife for several months now, Rasmussen being a 3-day tracker shows an odd weekly rhythm. For some reason, the worst polling day for Republicans is always Sunday, with Friday being only slightly better. So the 3-day aggregate that comes out on Monday is generally the worst of the week. By Thursday, the Sunday numbers have been flushed, so Thursday and Friday trackers are usually our best. Then it all goes slightly south again on Saturday when the Friday numbers get included.

It’s not an absolute rule, there’s the usual volatility that any poll will display, but that’s the way it works most of the time.